Taliban impose tele-ban and take Afghanistan offline

No internet or phones, which means no banks or commercial aviation, but lots more misery

Afghanistan has dropped off the global internet.

Outage-watchers NetBlocks and Cloudflare both attribute the outage to government action, a reasonable assumption given that the Taliban who rule Afghanistan recently cut off internet access in some provinces, citing the need to curb immoral behaviour.

NetBlocks and Cloudflare both observed internet traffic to Afghanistan waning on Monday, before traffic in and out of the country collapsed later that day. NetBlocks reports that telephone services are also down. Cloudflare spotted a drastic reduction in traffic from local mobile carriers.

Afghan news outlet TOLOnews has used its X account to report that the outage has halted all commercial flights to Afghanistan, and means local banks can’t contact their branch offices. Broadcasters have also encountered difficulties, TOLOnews reports.

The United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) has called on the Taliban “to immediately and fully restore nationwide internet and telecommunications access.”

“The cut in access has left Afghanistan almost completely cut off from the outside world, and risks inflicting significant harm on the Afghan people, including by threatening economic stability and exacerbating one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises,” UNAMA wrote in a Tuesday post.

“Such a ban has immediate and far-reaching consequences, including severely impacting the functioning of critical banking and financial systems, further increasing the isolation of women and girls, limiting access to emergency services and medical care, disrupting the aviation sector, and limiting access to remittances for dependent families.”

UNAMA also points out that telecoms networks are very useful during disasters – and that Afghanistan recently experienced severe earthquakes.

It is not unusual for governments to cut off websites they fear represent a moral danger – India has sometimes blocked all content from Pakistan, which has played whack-an-offensive-vid with YouTube for over a decade. China, Russia, and Iran prevent their citizens from seeing much of the global internet, and don’t allow use of unregistered VPNs. All three, however, encourage use of the internet within their borders.

Other government-ordered outages aim to curb free speech, often during moments when mass protests target ruling regimes. We’ve also seen outages ordered to preserve the integrity of major exams.

However, The Register is not aware of a government deciding telecommunications and the internet have no role in its society. Even North Korea allows a small elite to access the internet.

The Register suspects that’s also the case in Afghanistan, given the nation’s reliance on exports of illicit drugs as a source of revenue. ®